Music Video: theory

Both our Music Video Close-Study Products contain representations of black Americans. We therefore need to study a range of theories that address the representation of black or minority ethnic people in the media.

Notes from the lesson

Paul Gilroy: The Black Atlantic

Paul Gilroy is a key theorist in A Level Media and has written about race in both the UK and USA.

In The Black Atlantic (1993), Gilroy explores influences on black culture. One review states: “Gilroy’s ‘black Atlantic’ delineates a distinctively modern, cultural-political space that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but is, rather, a hybrid mix of all of these at once.”

Gilroy is particularly interested in the idea of black diasporic identity – the feeling of never quite belonging or being accepted in western societies even to this day.

For example, Gilroy points to the slave trade as having a huge cultural influence on modern America – as highlighted by Common’s Letter to the Free.

Diaspora: A term that originates from the Greek word meaning “dispersion,” diaspora refers to the community of people that migrated from their homeland. [Source: facinghistory.org]

Gilroy on black music

Gilroy suggests that black music articulates diasporic experiences of resistance to white capitalist culture. 

When writing about British diasporic identities, Gilroy discusses how many black Britons do not feel like they totally belong in Britain but are regarded as ‘English’ when they return to the country of their parents’ birth e.g. the Caribbean or Africa. This can create a sense of never truly belonging anywhere.

Additional theories on race representations and music

Stuart Hall: race representations in media

Stuart Hall suggests that audiences often blur race and class which leads to people associating particular races with certain social classes.

He suggests that western cultures are still white dominated and that ethnic minorities in the media are misinterpreted due to underlying racist tendencies. BAME people are often represented as ‘the other’.

Hall outlined three black characterisations in American media:

·               The Slave figure: “the faithful fieldhand… attached and devoted to ‘his’ master.” (Hall 1995)

·               The Native: primitive, cheating, savage, barbarian, criminal.

·               The Clown/Entertainer: a performer – “implying an ‘innate’ humour in the black man.” (Hall 1995)

https://youtu.be/Ouhdtrmzenw

Tricia Rose: Black Noise (1994)

 

Tricia Rose was one of the first academics to study the cultural impact of the hip hop genre in her influential book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994).

Rose suggested that hip hop initially gave audiences an insight into the lives of young, black, urban Americans and also gave them a voice (including empowering female artists). However, Rose has since criticised commercial hip hop and suggests black culture has been appropriated and exploited by capitalism.

Michael Eric Dyson: Know What I Mean (2007)

Georgetown University Professor of Sociology Michael Eric Dyson has passionately defended both hip hop and black culture – Jay-Z describes him as “the hip hop intellectual”.

 https://youtu.be/q6rBbT2UktU

Dyson suggests that political hip hop in the 1990s didn’t get the credit (or commercial success) it deserved and this led to the rap music of today – which can be flashy, sexualised and glamorising criminal behaviour.

Dyson states: “Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such critics. Sadly, the enlightened aspects of hip hop are overlooked by critics who are out to satisfy a grudge against black youth culture…” Michael Eric Dyson, Know What I Mean (2007)


Hip hop debate - full video
This appears to be the full Google debate on hip hop if you want to watch more from where those extracts came from.


Music Video theory - blog tasks

https://youtu.be/q6rBbT2UktU

Childish Gambino, the musical stage name of writer and performer Donald Glover, has just released a critique of American culture and Donald Trump with This Is America.

Racking up 10m views in 24 hours and already dubbed ‘genius’ and ‘a masterpiece’, the music video is a satirical comment on American culture, racism and gun violence.

Message- In the beginning, the man is shot in the head and then the gun is immediately thrown out to hide the murder. Then when the church is singing, that is representing a all black church ahooting that happened a little while ago. The shooting happened just because the church was an all black church. When the guy is joined by the dancing school kids, it is represented because that is showing how pop culture and music is distracting us from the real world. Everything in the background is what is really happening in the world but everyone is too blind by pop culture and the new things that keep coming out to realize it.

1) How does the This Is America video meet the key conventions of a music video?
It has a story line and good editing. Displays a powerful message. dancing  

2) What comment is the video making on American culture, racism and gun violence?

 Each time Childish Gambino fires a gun in “This Is America,” he hands it off to someone who whisks it away in a red cloth. Viewers interpreted these scenes as a reference to Americans’ willingness to protect gun rights over people, despite the country’s alarmingly high rates of gun violence. In one scene, black teenagers use their phones to record the chaos unfolding below, as their mouths appear to be covered by a white material. Some viewers believed this to be a reference to the rise of viral videos of police brutality and racist encounters to overcome the metaphorical muzzling of black people in a white supremacist system. Childish Gambino does a lot of insane dancing in what appears to be a one-shot onion of a video. As you peel back the layers, you get a beautifully dark portrait of the ultra violence and rage running through America, and, most importantly, residing in the minds of black Americans trying to survive this insanity. The final moments of the video show Gambino running, terrified, down a long dark hallway away from a group of people as Young Thug sings “You just a Black man in this world / You just a barcode, ayy.” Gambino’s sprint goes back to a long tradition of black Americans having to run to save their lives, according to Ramsey, who says one song dating back to slavery in the 19th century was called “Run N— Run.”“A black person running for his or her life has just been a part of American culture dating back to slavery,” he says. 

3) Write an analysis of the video applying the theories we have learned: Gilroy, Hall, Rose and Dyson. 
For Gilroy well her says never quite belonging in society and thats true because of all the racism in society. Hall says that BAME groups are misinterpreted in the media as bad people and thats how they are willingly portrayed in the video to show how the media has such a big impact on us that we forget about all the crime problems and focus on celebs. in addition Rose argues that hip hop has been exploited by capitalism and and we sort of see that in the music video with the way how hip hop looks so different now. like in the video its all happiness but then he kills them and it goes back to happy music. its saying how the media wants us not look at the past but focus on now and now is corrupt. Dyson says that because of the credit hip hop didnt get before it has led to rap and exploitation. this is supported by the video portraying by 

Read this Guardian feature on This Is America - including the comments below.

4) What are the three interpretations suggested in the article?
In the opening scenes, Glover uses grotesque smiles and exaggerated poses, with some on Twitter suggesting this is an invocation of the racial caricature Jim Crow. Another suggested Glover was accusing black performers – even himself – of “coonery”, or saying they are still made to feel like minstrels when they go out to perform their “black” music. One of the lyrics is “Grandma told me: get your money, black man”. Commenters on the lyric annotation site Genius have asked whether Glover feels that he has to take on stereotypically black performance roles (rapper, soul singer, comedian) to be able to earn money. His gunning down of the gospel choir singing the lyric suggests that he’s tired of the pressure to accumulate wealth, to be per-formatively black, and stay spiritually uplifted in an age of gun violence. A little like that video where you’re told to follow a basketball being passed around, and you miss the moonwalking bear in the background, Glover and co’s moves – doing YouTube dance crazes such as the hopping, kicking “shoot” – mask the riots happening behind them. The video’s choreographer, Sherrie Silver, retweeted a comment, perhaps in agreement, from someone who argued: “Childish Gambino’s dance moves distracted all of us from the craziness that was happening in the background of the video & that’s exactly the point he’s trying to make.”
the body was so quickly removed from the scene shows how fast we forget such trauma in our world.

5) What alternative interpretations of the video are offered in the comments 'below the line'

The murders show what life is actually like on the streets right now for average black dudes in America. It isn't meant to shock, just show what things are actually like. A black church congregation was gunned down a few years ago. Black people killed in pais, and groups every day. If you don't show something in compact form, it will not be known by those who aren't a part of the situation.
I don't see the murders as shocking, more than I open a page online to read about YET another shooting of a black guy.  If I'm not shocked at that, I have no right to be shocked at this video.  Violence made this video. The real violence on the street that kills people ( FYI blacks not whites) every minute in America. Are you so sanitized and clean you don't like to see this stuff? You couldn't be black then, or black American. Because it is a daily, real life situation in America.  ANd I guess the many layers of action you see are not trying to confound you. It's clear what they are. This is life on the street. A black man being chased by a police care, someone running as he's being accused of having a gun. It's not hard to understand Trying to overanalyze it all means you have never been in this situation.  As such, you need to watch it a few more hundred times to start feeling the feels that any black baby is going to feel in America right now. Chaos without reason , people running scared, panic in the streets, fear, stupidity. Just accept that this is the status quo.

Have you looked at the news lately? Like, the last five years? More blacks killed by shootings and police than before. Race riots, police attacks against non whites. If course it's important. It's graphic and doesn't paint everything sweet and heartfelt like a lot of pets would do.

So you are saying Murica does not have militarised police, mass surveillance, limited consequences for law enforcement "mistakes", racist power structures, suppressed minorities, unequal access to justice, authoritarian political tendencies, political overreach, imperial or racist laws, arbitrary exercise of power, harassment of dissenters and political dissidents, use of torture to extract confessions, punishment of whistleblowers........ good to know